Again, in her essay 'The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s', Marina identifies entropy as a modality through which we might experience alienation from the perceived 'usefulness' of reproductive labour—in the sense that 'a woman's work is never done'.[6] Jeanne Dielman returns, cutting a figure who embodies this entropic labour, where the sheer repetitive-entropic character of her life-as-work culminated as 'a source of psychic terror and disorganisation', on an affective level, which the protagonist tries to keep at bay with rules and routines, with diminishing success. For Marina, this is maintenance as 'unworking'. Likewise in Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Dust Paintings: art that describes this entropic character of work contributes to revealing its absurdity and futility. And Marina notes that all socially necessary labour, waged or not, shares this entropic quality: 'Work that is not recognised as work meets its own unrepresentability as an image—it is that which disappears, which is consumed, which unravels into pathology rather than delivers a product.'[7]
The Creation of Voids
The theme of the entropic appeared again in 2022, when Marina gave a talk at a space in Graz called Annenstrasse 53 that I was involved with. In this talk, and in another later that year, she brought her orientation towards entropy into the remit of landscape and nature, addressing the relationship between violence and form, both in relation to art and the geophysical world. Her contribution was pivotal to my recent work on the political aesthetics of the current ecological crisis—work partly inspired by living near what is slated to become Europe's first active lithium eco-mine in the Austrian Alps. The central image of that project articulates a kind of auto-death drive: the company's propaganda shows an electric car driving into the mouth of the mine, returning to the earth.
Cara New Daggett writes that 'thermodynamics mapped the new Earth through the figure of energy, a unit that retained its identity through time (energy conservation), even as its tendency to dissipate (entropy) imparted a tragic edge.'[8] The entropic, tragic aspect of finite, inevitably dissipating energy gave rise to the anxiety that it needs fixing and recharging. The term energy then expanded to include a technical sense, and was, in the 1970s, conjoined to its pair, crisis. The 1970s energy crisis gave rise to the invention of the rechargeable lithium battery, developed within ExxonMobil for the electric car—and soon after abandoned—to be renewed today in light of permanent wars and imminent climate collapse, in large part due to the burning of fossil fuels. This mine functions as a significant protagonist in the EU's Green Deal 'twin transition' to a decarbonised and digital economy—a planned transition to renewably charged, automated labour. This transition—which one might suggest we are watching slip past us as we approach the jaws of full rearmament—also resonates with a tendency in contemporary art to return to and reinvent Land Art by focusing on technologies of energy, extraction, and ecological collapse.
In her work on these questions, Marina brought into view the spectrum of value and valorisation, and entropy and devalorisation, combining notions of dispossession and devalued labour with 'cheap nature' through her interest in the void and voiding. In this short talk—a kind of response to Danny's poem Loading Terminal—she posits art as a means for the production of nothing, the production of voids, referring in passing to an article by Elizabeth Nicula titled 'The Artist is the Void' (published in Momus in 2022). In this moment, Marina's art objects are no longer feminist iterations of reproductive labour, but rather the much-hyped NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens—which come to stand in as the pinnacle of, in her words, 'the climate nihilism of financialised capital'.[9] With Nicula, NFTs become a means of creating voids. 'Entropy and exceptions intersect in how capitalist economies and societies operate,' writes Marina in Infrastructural Critique—thereby extending the formulation of entropy from housework to include wasted natures. More precisely, in her work, this dynamic once again extends from Marx's 'surplus value' to theorisations of capitalist social relations that focus on capital's 'ex-'—moving beyond simply exploitation to extraction, expropriation, and expulsion.[10]
In political ecology, as Marina notes, we see this principle clearly: nature is simultaneously constructed and devalued. Its devaluation affects everything from racialised and gendered labour to non-human life or the geophysical world, as a prerequisite for all of its commodification. Here, 'entropic waste is at once the exception to and constitutive of value'.[11] The wastedness of Jeanne Dielman's time and labour is thus brought onto a plane with non-human life or geological strata—echoing in some sense the work of Kathryn Yusoff. This logic leads to a kind of permanent 'primary accumulation'. Marina also locates it in the 'world-ecological surplus' discussed by Jason Moore, linking in the exhaustion of resources by the expansion of surplus capital. She diagnoses a 'parallelism between capitalist production and waste,' which 'aligns with the "surplus population" identified by Marx as a corollary to the capitalist mode of production, as well as the devaluation of reproductive labour'.[12]
In Marina's thinking—and in Infrastructural Critique—this making-entropic, this wasting away, is presented as crucial to capitalism's expansion. No longer as an image, or something which simply renders the absurdity of waste visible: entropic figures are anchors of value. Waste is as crucial to capital's reproduction as the reproduction of labour power. This contradiction is identified within Marx's own work, where the absorption and expulsion of labour power are fundamental to his theory of the 'reserve army of labour'—the pool of unemployed workers that keeps wages low and workers disciplined; capitalism needs to absorb labour to produce, but it also must expel labour through automation—through our current transitions—and crises, in order to attempt to maintain profitability. Maintenance as working, not unworking.
And Marina extends that same logic of simultaneous absorption and expulsion beyond the worker to encompass the entire living world: the exhaustion of one's body, the expulsion of a community from its land, and the creation of sacrifice zones and terminable landscapes. Recall Jameson: 'in our time all politics is about real estate; postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs; all politics are about the land.'[13] We find a metabolism of waste. She writes, 'every act of production by the worker is simultaneously the production of their own superfluity.'[14] Within this, processes of racialisation mediate dynamics of surplusing, orienting them towards certain communities: evident in genocides, carceral landscapes made up of refugee camps and the prison-industrial complex, and resource frontiers. 'Violence is the consequence, land expulsions, housing displacement, gentrification and the creation of "sacrifice zones" the cause.'[15]
Returning to Nicula's void, Michael Heizer's earthwork Double Negative—made up of two massive trenches cut into the landscape of Mormon Mesa in Moapa Valley, Nevada—marks a shift in scale where the sculpture, produced by removing 240,000 tons of sandstone from the landscape, shrinks in the face of the vastness of its surroundings, destabilising the viewer's subjective orientation. She writes, 'My sense of being nothing was profound. Compared to this, Double Negative seemed puny. It wasn't 50 years old yet, half a blip in the geological record and the walls already collapsing, perhaps faster than Heizer planned. It looked a lot like any roadside gravel yard, with dusty hillocks of gray-brown rock tumbling into the channel made when a backhoe extracts a load.' The vastness of the desert reduces the monumentality of Heizer's negation, itself in a state of accelerating decay. But significantly, Nicula raises a question: 'Where did the 240,000 irrelevant tons of sandstone go?'[16]
In Nicula's spatial analysis, 'Heizer's void … takes up the same amount of space as its byproduct'—like the amount of sand or rock extracted from any infrastructural tunnelling. Here, the void starts to index its opposite. The so-called double negative earthwork-as-artwork starts to index what she terms 'industrial earthworks': more impactful, more gigantic, more numerous—what we would normally call capitalist infrastructure. Industrial earthworks are, in her words, 'highways, and dams, and estuaries drained and filled, and massive solar panel arrays over bulldozed desert habitats, and shipping channels. They are mines and military detritus.'[17] They are holes and tunnels in the world. Gaping chasms. They are often the result of land grabs and population displacement.
Nicula's vision echoes Martin Arboleda's idea in The Planetary Mine, where modern cities are invoked as the technologically, philosophically, and economically 'inverted mines' of distant resource hinterlands, where the mineral wealth excavated from the depths of the earth is fixed in the urban built environment. For Arboleda, thinking of cities as 'inverted mines' warrants asking what sorts of spaces of extraction lie behind the fantastically alien skylines of megacities, some of which seem to have been transplanted directly from cyberpunk universes.[18] What kind of barren, terminal landscapes are produced in their inverse—or in Marina's term, what voids are made in the world just for these elevated cities to rise up?
Extending Nicula's vision, then, Heizer's is an example of art that indexes this form of violent extraction, shaping the landscape, the extraction of natural resources, and labour. Double Negative is turned into a kind of icon of American and planetary extraction: 'earthworks such as Heizer's extract for the sake of extraction', Nicula writes. Yet Heizer and Land artists like Smithson did not conceive of the conditions that functioned as enabling constraints of their works—the conditions that also underpinned the turn to 'dematerialised', or attempted de-commodified, entropic works. Yet as Marina shows, dematerialisation as escape was based on an illusion, and Land art was entirely dependent on the conditions of possibility given by—and the infrastructures of—specifically US imperialism and colonial expansion, as well as 'industrial agriculture, Cold War military budgets and the displacement of indigenous communities', which the artists either did not notice or may have imagined they were transcending.
To reiterate: the argument that Marina picked up on, just under three years ago, was that like earthworks, Non-Fungible Tokens also make holes for the sake of it—holes for holes' sake, a veritable autonomy of wasted energy—but on a far greater scale than simply extracting 240,000 tons of sandstone. NFTs burn through huge amounts of carbon just to exist, quantities that might equate to months of household energy use. Since the quick fad of NFTs—do they still exist?—Artificial Intelligence now requires inordinate quantities of water and energy just to burn through the data needed to train its programmes, which are currently being used for everything from writing emails to mass surveillance, to making kill lists and enacting annihilation in Gaza: dropping bombs to create new craters, burying buildings with families inside, negating entire villages and obliterating life.[19] Beyond this direct violence, domination, and obliteration of nature and humans—as continual capitalist production of nature—AI has pushed a surge in investment in nuclear energy, with Amazon and Google striking deals for small nuclear reactors that will serve AI data centres by 2035.[20]
Contradictions of Transition
When art addresses the energy transition, it must also grapple with its central contradictions, particularly the accessibility of raw materials. Very briefly: even according to the EU's own claims, renewable energy technologies—all rechargeable devices, etc.—are 'far more materials-intensive than conventional ones'.[21] It is predicted that if critical minerals are required in quantities that are exponentially increasing, huge swathes of the planet will be rendered sacrifice zones—lands degraded and depleted. And the EU can secure only 2–4% of necessary minerals at the extraction stage, highlighting its dependence and potential resource-driven aggression. A clear example of this dynamic is Trump's wish to purchase or simply 'take' Greenland, the world's largest island—not motivated by green energy, since Trump's ethos is 'Drill Baby Drill', but by the strategic opportunities offered by melting ice, new shipping routes, and the needs of the defence industry, a priority sharpened by China's ban on the export of gallium, a mineral required for all guided missiles.
Source geographies from which materials are combined and transformed into technology give way to yet more vulnerability, in the extensive diversity of their locations and the histories, potential conflicts, and struggles implied therein. If we look at just one of the 15 named technologies—namely robotics, responsible for transforming labour relations, devaluing living labour, and being integrated across sectors such as industry, agriculture, healthcare, transport, social services, defence, space, and even undersea operations (e.g., deep-sea mining)—the EU controls just 3% of the raw materials needed for production.[22] Thus, the extraction phase for these materials maps onto imperial and colonial legacies of dispossession and exploitation, underscoring the geopolitical violence embedded within supply chains, and as such, the nodal points of potential or anticipatory resistance—or 'infrastructural critique'.[23]
Holding together the economic and geologic poles, we see that capital invests more in the technological side of production over time, while less living labour is required to produce more output. But what composes the material dimension of this rising organic composition of capital is the territories of raw dispossession and extraction at the beginning—and most vulnerable moment—of the supply chain. This technology transforms the organic composition of capital, annihilating or surplusing, in Marina's words, living labour through automation. And, on the other hand, even if we are now seeing the Green Deal as a ghost of its promise, these resources are needed for weapons that destroy landscapes twice over.
For Nicula—and Marina—the void of the earthwork cannot counter its harm, and the NFT—but we can add all manner of AI-generated forms or activities—has surpassed land art in its capacity to create inverted horizons. Here, the production of enormous amounts of waste, and the annihilation or nothingisation of the world, is correlative to the production of voids in the landscape, with the absence of use value in NFTs. Throughout Marina's work, the exceptions to value are also the anchors of value, in the sense that unwaged labour and uncommodified nature enter the value cycle as simultaneously free inputs and piles upon piles of waste.
Coda
Finally, in Infrastructural Critique, Marina writes: 'infrastructure is always specific', and 'infrastructure defines the material reproduction conditions of forms of social life and accumulation strategies that equate to destroyed life for some and wealth and comfort for others.'[24] We know: 'broken infrastructure is loquacious.' Infrastructure becomes louder and louder when it breaks down, just as necessary labour becomes most prominent and most visible when those who undertake it choose to withdraw it. In his introduction to Infrastructural Critique, Danny writes that 'infrastructure' appears at the end of Speculation as a Mode of Production 'as a sub-category of the useful, a term in a relation, a hole in a thing that it is not'. We know, in Marina's parlance, infrastructure makes possible, just as it makes impossible. Like affirmative theories of social reproduction—which neglect to understand it within capitalist totality—affirmative theories of infrastructure neglect its necropolitical dimensions and its contributions to the totality of value relations. And though she was averse to ossified thought—being infinitely playful and open—certain figures persistently return: the fundamental dialectic of the extraction and waste disposal of labourers, lives, and natures.
This is a further instantiation of the core logic that runs throughout Marina's work: the constitutive status of the exception in relation to the rule, or capitalism always needing an outside to feed off. The counter-movement against bad entropies—which, in her terms, are capable of falling into nihilistic atrophy or romantic ruination—is a form of social organisation: cutting gaps, not holes. From trade unionism and struggles against deregulated labour conditions to life-cycle analysis and urban mining—taking the city's riches to rebuild the city, rather than boring holes into the planet; direct action and sabotage against the war machine; strategic struggles against fossil fuel extraction—connecting the struggles, or, to quote Marina from a conversation in Arts of the Working Class, these are framed 'as a bare minimum for winning time from the geophysical meltdown that will further degrade the conditions for struggles around life, reproduction, and justice, and the ability to make any defensible gains.'[25]
